When I was younger, I thought Dead Space 2 was the usual case of a horror game starting incredibly strong and then weakly limping to the finish, but this most recent playthrough has totally inverted my opinion; while the first half gets all the nicest areas and flashiest setpieces, it’s the second half, where you’re funneled through the metal guts of the station, that the encounters start to pick up, with a wider range of enemies to deal with and a playful sense of meanness to the combat design- like a memorable room where the game spawns an explosive enemy right next to a breakable window that’ll send you out into the vacuum of space if you so much as touch it. The final section is amazing as well, chased by a regenerating necromorph that gets the best use out of your busted kit out of all the challenges in the game, forced to push through hordes of enemies while this unstoppable enemy is constantly shadowing you.

But all this should be couched in the fact that many of its best moments here hover around the opening 30 minutes of RE4- you’ll be really lucky if you’re fighting multiple waves of enemies or have to make meaningful decisions of who to prioritize first in combat, the designers seemingly all too comfortable to throw the standard melee and acid-spitting necromorphs at you and a haphazard assortment of the other enemy types as a little bit of flavor. Some of this flattening is due to how powerful your Stasis ability is: because so many of the encounters take place in this tiny corridors and cramped hallways, it’s really easy to negate the threat of an ambush or poor positioning by freezing an enemy and dismembering them with little thought on your part, aided by how generous the game is with dropping stasis packs and doling out recharge stations. It’s something especially felt with the Stalker enemies, a standout addition deemed so important that they get their own dedicated rooms, but they end up being some of the simplest in practice- boiling down to hunkering in a corner and waiting for them to run at you, a cool enemy type that feels unfinished when fought on their own. (The fact that you never fight these guys while dealing with your O2 meter is a massive shame, something that might’ve curbed how easy it is to passively engage them.)

Maybe the most damning thing here is that the weightlessness of the new additions to the bestiary highlight just how well-considered the original’s enemies were, testing you on the applications of the dismemberment system and on third-person shooting in a way none of the new creatures do- the frantic, vertical movement of the scorpion-like Leapers or the surgical precision demanded for the Pregnant necromorphs, diluted here with a lot of stuff that swarms you and that can be beaten out more simply with direct damage. A lot of the discussion about the two games centers on the weakening of the survival horror elements from the first entry to the second, but I think this less defined mechanical identity is probably the bigger loss for the series.

Still, a hard game for me to really dislike- nails the feedback for combat (even reloading looks cool!) and I’m not sure if another game has had a better justification and visualization for the combat tunnel/amazing skybox/combat tunnel structure than working your way through the various sectors of a dystopian mining station. Was ultimately reminded a lot of my time going through Titanfall 2 a few years ago, a strong string of setpieces and a great-feeling avatar not able to shake the feeling that the encounter design never really pushed the mechanics far enough.

Extra thoughts:

- Played through the game on Zealot, and got about halfway through on the limited-save Hardcore difficulty before losing a couple of hours of progress when I clipped through the floor of a tram and opted to call it there. Otherwise, I think these are pretty admirable difficulty modes, the increased lethality and reduced ammo of the former and the endurance needed for the latter do a nice job at recontextualizing the game. Granular bits of optimization, like being able to use random kinesis objects to slowly bludgeon enemies to death and getting a free refill on ammo and health when you upgrade their capacity, turn into run-saving maneuvers when you're under so much pressure. Good stuff.

- The Severed DLC is slightly more respectable than I remembered- the stasis enemies from Dead Space 1 aren’t a super-noticeable addition, but going backwards through old areas is far less egregious than it sounds, both due to some nice enemy arrangements (probably has the best Stalker encounter in the game) and for the fact that the player character comes with a predefined loadout that might get you to see a different side of the arsenal. Would never have used the Seeker rifle otherwise, for instance.

After beating 1st quest for the first time...

Honestly I'm surprised how much I appreciated this game. The first few times I tried to get into it, I would get lost and confused, look at these pixels vaguely organized to look like NPCs, enemies, levels and just tune out. This time I finally settled in and it just worked. The game is infamous for being obtuse and hard to understand but between tips from the manual and in-game I think it's surprisingly straightforward, but requiring of patience. This isn't a large game but by forcing a player to really look at every tile of it's world, it makes a limited pallette of pretty much every aesthetic sense, music, visuals, colors, space, etc feel like an intimate world you come to understand only through experimentation. Every room becomes a mystery because anything that can hide a secret, needs to be investigated, and many of the limitations of the game reinforce this. Maybe you were actually slightly off with that fire when you tried to check if it was a burnable tree? You gotta check it again, thems the breaks, and that willingness to allow frustration leaves so much room for the player to interact with a tiny microcosm of 1's and 0's.

Something this game I think does directly better than a lot of future installments, reward. Tho basic, the insentive to find new shit is important to the functioning of this game. If a player simply doesn't take their time, the game's difficulty curve becomes fucked, with enemies become terrifying behemoths and even the act of exploration becomes elongated and more tedious. Future Zeldas, especially the first 4 3D ones, heart containers often felt frivilous because of how easy the combat was, new items would not to uncommonly lose a lot of use past their specific level, or be mostly used to get around barriers to exploration. Barriers exist in this, but far less, with a very large ability to do things completely out of order, The final level isn't even particularly hard to find, accessible by bombs which is a very early item that can be bought in stores, which is often as close as this game comes to "handing" you anything.

I also miss how older games such as this combined the physical with the digital in expecting the player to rely on a physical book that came with it. It gives off this sense of you beginning the adventure before even booting up the game, you are the hero being given the mission, and Link is the body through which you are actualized in order to complete that mission.

I will almost certainly revisit this to do 2nd Quest, but for now I'm excited to start Zelda II. On to the next adventure!!

The first issue of Nintendo Power that I ever read (#231) included a segment titled “BEST OF THE BEST,” where Chris Slate and the gang ranked what they considered the twenty greatest games for every Nintendo console. As an eight year-old sitting in a seven-week summer camp where videogames were absolutely off-limits, this was a treasure trove. So much had already stoked my curiosity for my pastime’s past, Nintendo’s in particular, and this magazine was a whole gallon of kerosene on that tiny lil’ flickering spark. It’s here that the seeds of intrigue for the Legend of Zelda series were first planted in my brain, seeing as it always seemed to narrowly edge out the guy I was there to see (up until the dedicated Wii page, where Mario Galaxy reigned supreme), but in the small collection of those that stood up there with the Big Boys was a glaring anomaly. The GameCube was my introduction to the medium, emblematic of Mario Kart and Sonic Adventure, but here, it was host to the grungiest entry on the entire list. Scary, even, for a kid as timid as I was. That fiery screenshot, with its grotesque giant towering over a gun-toting action hero, branded itself onto the grooves of my gray matter. And right beneath it —

01 – RESIDENT EVIL 4

Somehow, the whimsy and imagination I so craved had lost out to the brutish violence I'd glimpsed in more “MATURE” content, and on its home turf, too…I might’ve been a bit startled, but I had the whole rest of the summer to think it over. I knew that if even the staff of Nintendo Power had to hand the cup to Capcom (themselves acknowledging how rare it was for a “third-party game to top Nintendo on its own system”), there must’ve been something to it.

Fast-forward another fourteen years, and Resident Evil 4’s reputation has become impossible to ignore. Its third-person shooting is so legendarily perfect that it “killed” its own series, cutting off any and all future for fixed camera angles, but also never quite being succeeded by anything that managed to improve on its gameplay. There’s even been some renewed vitriol levied against RE4 in recent years now that the series has managed to finally recapture some amount of its success with something closer to an A-Horror aesthetic (at least among fans I know), but either way, the conversation has never seemed able to escape from the devouring whirlpool of that fourth entry. I still hadn’t gotten around to any of ‘em myself, having decided I wasn’t a horror guy or a shooting guy for most of my life, but that was changing as I was gradually broadening the scope of my personal taste. Eventually I figured that, if I was ever gonna get around to Resident Evil, I’d be one of those diehard fixed camera haunted house puzzle box fiends, decrying 4’s abandonment of all that is subtle, terrifying, and holy. It was too colorless, too vapid to catch the interest of one with taste as REFINED as myself. Right. As if.

No, I’m not too good for Resident Evil 4. Not even close, and I knew it within the first fifteen minutes. It takes no time at all before we’re fending off crowds of parasite-infected villagers as the most adorkable government operative this side of Solid Snake, and if the goofy “rEsiDeNt eeEEviLLL…fOOOUUuurRRR” on the title screen didn’t gear me up for a schlock-fest, Leon’s indelible “bingo” quip did the trick. Even as an MGS fan, I don’t know if I’d have guessed how well that balance between the tense, sometimes genuinely fear-inducing gameplay and the campy fun of the story would work for me. Metal Gear’s cartoonish stealth often straddles the same line between silly and serious as its cutscenes, but the shamelessly corny character interactions here were a relief, a chance to laugh before plunging back into atmospheric danger, and that made it much more endearing than I’d expected. I understand the pushback against some of the nonsense here, especially with such a strong opening area, but it was just too entertaining to ever strike me as some kind of tragic missed opportunity. I never thought I’d enjoy quicktime events, and escort missions are rarely done well, but the occasional button-mash and the presence of a companion both counterbalance the thrilling dread of the regular gameplay in all of the right ways (and RE4’s gameplay somehow manages to measure and expand on both ideas).

Despite the recent ubiquity of the genre, I hadn’t actually played a dedicated third-person shooter before this game (so my bewilderment over its greatness is probably not that far off from players of its day), but my impression of the sixth console generation had always been, when it came to the big names, an eschewing of tightness and gameplay depth in favor of breadth and spectacle. I was more wrong than I realized. Resident Evil 4 is almost, if not as dedicated to its core hook as the original Super Mario Bros., and its ability to take a minimalistic and intuitive system and spin it out into dozens of dynamic situations is about as well-documented too. The temptation to build a game around a narrative concept or theme can be strong, but RE4 is a textbook example of what happens when a designer picks one verb and rolls with it all the way, come hell or high water. You don’t need me rattling off every little nuance, but its handling of the interplay between ranged and melee combat is so sick that, even without a plot, the promise of getting to set up and execute the next head-smashing suplex would’ve been enough to carry me through the entire game both times.

Slim resources are a fine way to get the player to pick their shots carefully, but this added layer means they’re also weighing where and when to aim to get the most out of every bullet. Headshots open the door to sweeping roundhouse kicks which can topple an entire tide of lurching foes, but, unless I could afford to spend some shotgun ammo, I never wanted to be too close to the horde while I was at it. I found myself sizing up a situation, firing off some careful headshots from afar, and then closing the distance to cash in on that splash damage. Shooting below the knees is best when looking to take out an individual enemy with a spectacular skull slam. That simple decision makes it so much more than your typical “glory kill,” it always rewards the player for thinking several steps ahead. ‘Course, you’ve got more on hand than just a couple of guns and Leon’s ridiculous muscles, and RE4 rarely disappoints the desire to use the environment in creative ways. In one of the best moments in either of my playthroughs, I threw down a flash grenade while surrounded by goons, and quickly took advantage of the resulting stun effect to kick all of them, one by one, down a hole in the center of the room. Unless any other third-person shooter can offer anything nearly that good, I'm afraid I’ll have to kindly ask the genre to sit down. This game goes in so many directions with its core mechanics that I don’t even feel much of a need to play any of its successors, spiritual or otherwise.

If there is a downside to that insatiable exploration of concepts, though, it’s that it reveals just how narrow the range of RE4’s excellence really is. Its pacing is just about perfect almost all the way through, dialing the intensity up and down with tremendous care and drawing from a seemingly endless barrel of ideas (it can’t be understated that just about every encounter features a distinct spin of its own that makes the engagement unique), but somehow, it didn’t quite manage to wow me in the end. I’m talking about the very end here, just the final few setpieces. Maybe capping off such a crowd-focused game system on a more traditional one v. one final boss fight wasn’t quite the right move, perhaps the insanity of that second to last segment was just a little too messy (despite being succeeded by a pretty great little zone), maybe the game had already hit such a spiraling high just a little earlier that the final stretch couldn’t possibly have lived up, or maybe it really did need a bit more weight to its drama to make that ending sing. Whatever the reason, it’s hard to criticize RE4 for failing to “stick to its guns” when it does so fantastically over the course of the whole game, but it clearly does best in those explorable combat arenas, filled with ins and outs and enemy types to strategize around. When the conclusion finally did roll in, it seemed to have already exhausted just about every possible configuration of those parts it could dream up, but it’s a good thing it ends only a little after it stops playing to those very particular strengths. Surprised as eight year-old me might’ve been to hear this coming from himself, that just makes it all the more enticing to hop back over to the start and climb Resident Evil 4’s rollicking “Tower of Terror” over again.

I guess Chris Slate was just me all along...

Alien Soldier is the very definition of Sink Or Swim. It doesn't care who you are or where you came from, you're not going ANYWHERE until you blast this massive, writhing, cybernetic worm thing all the way to Hell. If Shadow of the Colossus can be called a “Boss Rush,” then Alien Soldier is a “Boss Stampede.” A “Boss Bullet Train.” A “Hyper Boss Fighter II Turbo: Fight for the Future.“ Why nobody’s been hollering loudly about Alien Soldier’s greatness for the last two decades is seriously beyond me, though it’s probably because they’re all too busy evangelizing Gunstar Heroes (or — checks notes — Minecraft). Then again, as of my writing this, Alien Soldier already has a higher average rating than Gunstar Heroes on Backloggd.com, though, let’s pretend I’m not preaching to the choir for just a moment.

Somewhere between Treasure’s previous run-and-gun ventures and Sin and Punishment, Alien Soldier achieves actual, No-Really relentlessness. Barreling through setpiece after setpiece, packed with wild battles so frantic that your real-world cool-headedness becomes an active game mechanic, its manufactured setting takes on an air of genuine ferocity. It’s so videogame-y that, in the heat of the moment, its game-y-ness folds back on itself and becomes believability. The drama that emerges from its extreme white-knuckle “VISUALSHOCK!!” action grinds the nonsense story on the title screen down to powder. Rather than getting kicked back to a level select, you progress until you win or die. And “winning” puts every twitch action reflex bone in your body to the test.

Remember how, right at the start, Gunstar Heroes made you choose whether or not you’d be able to move while shooting for the whole game? Alien Soldier laughs directly into the camera, says “THAT was dumb,” reels back, and hurls the car keys your way at mach five. It’s your responsibility to work out When to do What. Select any four of six possible weapons to cycle between. Press the jump button in mid-air to hover in place. You can walk on the ceiling. Parry bullets to turn them into health blobs. Reach max health, and your invulnerable dash becomes a Fiery Death Charge. Because this is a certifiably Great Videogame, this damages you slightly. Here, the rhythm of Alien Soldier’s dance comes into focus. Swap modes, cycle weapons, fire, dodge, cycle again, hover, parry bullets, dash, and you might just live to fight the next unholy abomination. You can breathe when it’s over.

It’s a dollar on Steam.

this is a title that feels downright oppressive at first. your protagonist takes up an absolutely absurd amount of screen real estate; you have a wealth of complex techniques to master mapped to only three different buttons; there's six different weapons, not all of which are applicable in every scenario, and there are upwards of twenty different ways of representing your status and resources; the only available difficulties are SUPEREASY and SUPERHARD. this is unruly, frantic, and demanding, and you'll likely spend a fair amount of time dying repeatedly just to make heads or tails of the game because it shoves you right into the crossfire, before you might even be aware that the entire game is tantamount to a boss rush.

stick with it. conquer the game on SUPERHARD, no matter how arduous. it's the rare game that makes the most of every single mechanic on offer, where each design implementation is representative of an uncanny degree of fine-tuning and polish. i can point to any one detail in this game, no matter how consequential or intangible, and give you a sensible, informative, and well-articulated answer for why it was designed this way. doubtless the masters at treasure can, too. it's tooth-and-nail adrenaline-inducing frenzy condensed into an hour's run time

The developers cite Wild Guns as one of their main influences for this, so of course I’m inclined to like it.

As is so often the case, the first playthrough sort of feels like an elaborate tutorial, able to disregard the utility of certain weapons or forget about whole mechanics for stages at a time (You can hit bullets?). I was ready to say the game had a great deal of unrealized potential, but a few minutes of dabbling in hard mode, where there are no health refills, and suddenly I was weighing the safety of cover versus dodge rolling, trying to find the appropriate niche for each weapon.

Looming over all this is a countdown timer for a bomb, (presumably) detonating if you take too long to finish the game. I say presumably, because the timer only adds up your best time in each stage, meaning you can simply replay old levels for a better time without worrying that you’re frittering away your chance at the good ending. Nevertheless, it’s an ominous feeling, low ranks wounding your pride but also eating away at the amount of time until the city is destroyed. Not sure if it’s an aspect of the game that should’ve been leaned on more or if it’s better served as a bit of mechanical theming- might’ve been too demoralizing to claw your way to the end, only to realize you’ve locked yourself into the bad ending.

Unsighted is probably the best game of 2021 that you haven’t heard of. Where other games like it would be content to deliver a very carefully crafted and strongly guided experience to the player and leave lot of people satisfied, Unsighted opts to do the unthinkable: It just lets loose.

This top-down action game see you explore a world, beat up some enemies, solve some light puzzles and find ways to travel to your destination, not unlike Zelda. After a short prologue that shows you the ropes of combat and sets up the narrative and world, you find yourself in an overworld where an NPC marks the five McGuffins you have to find on the map. And then you can just do whatever you want. Yes, absolutely whatever you want. After I collected the first traversal item (a pair of high jump boots), I was apprehensive and thought the game might lead me through a predetermined sequence of events, just taking me along for the ride while actually orchestrating everything itself.

Stubborn as I am, I looked at my options and set out, determined to do the last dungeon first and to fall on my face in that endeavour. I did not. While the game would not let me just waltz right into the hardest dungeon, I just happened to stumble upon an item which let me traverse the overworld map in ways that clearly skipped the normal sequence of events, but the game did not do so begrudgingly, it openly handed me this weapon with a wink and told me to wreak havoc. This was the moment I knew I was in for something special. Instead of just heading to each dungeon, I largely explored the overworld map and I was thoroughly fascinated with the fact that I was very clearly just circumventing all the Zelda-esque traversal puzzles with my new-found weapon.

While there is a clear intended progression order and reliance on some dungeon items, it is also almost always possible to circumvent any given traversal block with some path you haven’t found yet. There are always multiple paths to your destination, and you probably can take half of them. But the true genius of Unsighted lies not only in the map design or the availability of items that let you just skip things, no. The game even has hidden movement techniques that let you further skip puzzles and obstacles in the overworld. At this point, a comparison to Super Metroid is inevitable: Yes, these optional movement techniques have the same versatility and sense of discovery that a shinespark and a walljump in that game grant you. A comparison between these games ends up making Unsighted see eye to eye with the search action juggernaut - that is a highly impressive feat in itself. You can legitimately play this game and explore its dungeons like you would for one of the classic Zelda games if you follow the intended progression sequence, but you can also play it like me and just blow caution to the wind. I am impressed how well the game manages to deliver on both of these types experiences, depending on which you opt for.

Another feature immensely helping the game’s openness on replays is the crafting system. While anybody who has played any video games in the last 10 years will probably just roll their eyes at this particular phrase, Unsighted surprises with another great idea: What if you could, on future playthroughs, just craft the dungeon items? This game does the unthinkable and lets you – as far as I know – craft almost all weapons and items at the crafting table, and that includes the dungeon items that are used for traversal. You just need to know the recipe. Not only does this mean that you could access the whole map from the start if you wanted to, it also means that you can make a choice on future replays. Do you want to abuse the crafting system or do you want to have another exploratory playthrough? Almost every facet of this game facilitates its openness, and that isn’t even going into how keys and key doors are designed and placed in this game, which gives you another layer of choice for your traversal of the map.

The combat in this game plays like a mix between Dark Souls and Hyper Light Drifter. You can do melee attacks or shoot with a gun. The weapons all have different attributes, and there are a multitude of viable strategies to approach combat. The equivalent of the estus flask, the syringe, fills up when you hit enemies. You have a stamina meter and you can dodge or block/parry enemy attacks. You can also equip “chips” that increase different attributes like number of bullets or weapon strength, as well as some with more specific effects, like a chip that makes the syringe fills slowly on its own. Weapon and chip choice leads to a lot of customizability and this customizability is what makes combat (theoretically) very satisfying and varied. My main strategy was to equip a machine gun and an axe so I could stunlock enemies with the gun while selectively doing big damage. One of the main problems here is that for stronger enemies parry and countering is such a disproportionally easier and quicker strategy than everything else, that the game turns into parry fishing on many of the bosses and mini-bosses - the parry counter also results in your stamina recharging and syringes being filled quicker than with normal attacks, making it an even better option. It’s a shame too, because only 2 of the bosses don’t let you fish more parries much, and that showed me what exhilarating combat the game is capable of when you don’t feel the need to parry everything to do any sort of substantial damage. I would have preferred a system where the moment-to-moment combat with normal attacks was the focus while making the parry feel more like an optional mechanic.

The last large facet of the game is the timer system. This game not only has a timer for your exploration, but for every NPC, so if you bumble about for too long in your adventure or just die too often to the enemies and bosses, you will be left with a barren world without shops or people to talk to. Even your small Navi-like companion can die after some time. The only way to alleviate this is to give these people (or yourself) the meteor dust that has been distributed in copious amounts across the map. If you extend an NPCs life three times they will give you a special item that fits their function and character. This can range from gaining new chips to acquiring things like a portable forge that lets you upgrade weapons anywhere as long as you have the money. The timer system does make exploration more stressful, but also more rewarding. The meteor dust is really hidden everywhere, and you will likely not feel helpless in the face of the time limit (even if I lost 3 NPCs to this system). On the difficulty I played – normal – the timer was just generous enough, considering how often I died and how many detours I made.

Other than my single qualm about the parry in combat, Unsighted’s gameplay comes together beautifully, and additionally to the great gameplay, it is also just visually stunning and the soundtrack is a treat, setting the mood for intrigue and action during exploration and combat segments. The all-female main cast is also inherently a big plus, because you just don’t see it very often in this medium.

This review has gone on for long enough, and what else can I even say? This game can measure up in all regards to explorative titans like Super Metroid. It is just as replayable, speedrunnable and enjoyable in all modes of play. If you like exploration in games, you will very likely love this game, and it’s a unique blend of different genres that will make me remember it fondly and replay it just as often as I do with my other favorite search action games.

The definitive action game. I wasn't a fan of action games when I started it, but this one won me over, partly due to the style system and partly due to the super memorable boss lineup. Every action game should really have something like the gunslinger style, where you can disrupt enemies that are sneaking up for you in a way other than dodging. Every action game should have rival characters like Vergil, who evolve in their abilities in the same way you do for climactic showdowns that repeatedly escalate in both mechanical complexity and narrative stakes. The weapons should have personality and depth, the enemies and their attacks should be distinct... anything you think an action game needs, Devil May Cry 3 has it. Action games today still struggle to hit this perfect balance, but with this game, even an action game skeptic like me has to admit the potential in the genre.